Left I on the News

A leftwing view of the day's news and the way it's presented in the media

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

ABC News spots (and spouts) "propaganda"

ABC News tonight aired a piece taken from an al Qaeda website, showing a suicide bomber in Afghanistan preparing a bomb, loading his car, and then ending with a large explosion as a U.S. Army convoy passed by. At the end of the piece, anchor Charlie Gibson asked the reporter Brian Ross, "Isn't a tape like that nothing more than propaganda?" [transcribed, as is the quote below, by me from video available here] This from a network which, like every other U.S. corporate media outlet, has aired literally hundreds of "gunsight" videos provided by the U.S. military over the years of buildings exploding, targets "taken out," and so on. Somehow I don't recall ABC or anyone else identifying any of those as "propaganda."

Nor did Gibson seem to be aware that just a few sentences earlier he had indulged in a bit of propaganda all on his own, when he introduced the piece by stating "It is almost impossible to comprehend the mind of a teenager who believes there's glory in taking innocent lives, or more to be gained in death than in life." Of course, this young man almost certainly believes no such thing. What he was convinced of, I have no doubt, is that there's glory in killing members of an army occupying your country, and that the cause he was fighting for was a cause worth dying for. Rather a different thing than "killing innocent people for glory."

Updated by replacing my quotations from memory with transcriptions of the exact quotes from the video online at the ABC World News site.